The Gregorian calendar is a mess and everyone knows it but nobody says it.
Thirty days hath September, April, June and November — a rhyme that exists solely because we built a timekeeping system so inconsistent it requires memorisation to operate. February has 28 days. Except when it has 29. Months have 30 or 31 days seemingly at random. The year starts on a different day every year. Nothing lines up. Nothing repeats. We have been doing this since 1582 and we are used to it the way you get used to a door that sticks — not because it’s fine but because fixing it feels like too much effort.
There is a better system. It has existed for over a century. It is almost insultingly logical. And we collectively decided not to use it.
This is a pitch to find out what happens when a handful of people decide differently.
The International Fixed Calendar
Thirteen months. Twenty eight days each. Every month identical — four clean weeks, same shape, same structure, every single time. One extra day — Year Day — sits outside the month system entirely, a global holiday between the old December and January. Leap years get a second.
That accounts for the whole year. Neat, symmetrical, done.
Every date falls on the same day of the week every year. The 15th is always a Monday. The 28th is always a Saturday. Quarters are equal. Payroll is predictable. The phrase “it depends on how the month falls” ceases to have meaning.
The system even inserts a new month — Sol — between what we currently call June and July. Thirteen months, each with a name, each with exactly four weeks, each beginning on a Sunday and ending on a Saturday.
George Eastman — founder of Kodak — ran his entire company on this calendar for years. He implemented it internally in the 1920s, championed it for global adoption, and by all accounts found it significantly easier to operate within. The League of Nations considered it seriously. The Catholic Church objected. Business interests resisted. Legacy won, as legacy tends to.
We kept the mess.
The Series
28 Days is a reality documentary series following a group of subjects — different ages, different contexts, different relationships with time — who agree to live, work, and plan exclusively on the International Fixed Calendar for one full year.
Not a simulation. Not a thought experiment. A real commitment, in real life, with real consequences.
The subjects are chosen for contrast as much as character:
A family with school-age children — birthdays shifting, school terms misaligning, the calendar on the fridge suddenly wrong. What does it do to the rhythm of a household when the rhythm of the year changes?
A small business — payroll, tax deadlines, client billing, staff schedules. The International Fixed Calendar was designed for exactly this environment. Does it actually deliver? Or does operating differently from every supplier, partner, and customer create friction that erases the gains?
A freelancer — someone whose relationship with time is already fluid, already self-determined. Is the calendar easier to adopt when nobody else controls your schedule? Or does isolation from the standard calendar create its own problems?
A public figure — someone whose calendar is managed by other people, whose commitments are set months in advance, whose life runs on a system they didn’t design and can’t easily escape. What happens when they try anyway?
Same experiment. Completely different worlds. One calendar.
What The Series Is Really About
On the surface this is a show about timekeeping. Underneath it is about something more interesting — how the invisible systems we inherit shape the way we live without us ever choosing them.
The Gregorian calendar wasn’t designed for human beings trying to organise their lives. It was designed by committee in the sixteenth century to serve specific religious and political interests and has been patched and adjusted ever since. We didn’t adopt it because it was the best option. We adopted it because it was the existing one, and existing systems have enormous inertia.
28 Days asks a simple question: what changes when you change the system?
The answer won’t be what anyone expects. Some subjects will find genuine clarity — cleaner months, predictable weeks, a year that finally repeats itself. Others will discover that the calendar is the least of their problems, that the friction isn’t in the system but in everyone around them still running on the old one. Some will quit. Some will evangelise. At least one of them will try to convince their employer, their school, or their government to follow suit.
The comedy is real. The insight is real. And at the end of a year, we’ll know something we currently only theorise about — what it actually costs to live differently from everyone else, and whether it’s worth it.
Why Now
We are living through a period of serious reconsideration of inherited systems. How we work, where we work, what we owe institutions that were built for a different century. The calendar has escaped that scrutiny almost entirely, which makes it the perfect lens.
It’s also just a genuinely entertaining premise. Watching a family explain to a grandparent that their birthday is now in Sol is worth the price of admission alone.
28 Days is a pitch in development. If you are a commissioner, producer, or distributor who sees what this could be — I would very much like to talk.
— Rich & Claude